Profitability vs. Useabilty

[scaturan]

I spent a few days or so digging through 100's of photographer sites, mostly wedding/event photographers. From what I gather, the majority are using "flash-based" code snippets & editor-generated (frontpage, golive, etc..) photo-galleries.

The same group of photographers are also using commercial services like Collages, PhotoReflect, PrintRoom that use 100% flash-based solutions to provide their clients the ability to share with friends/family (but only for a limited time), order prints and other accolades, from DVD/CD slideshows to picture frames, calendars and t-shirt imprints. Overall, it's for profitability purposes for both parties.

The same group of photographers don't like the idea of providing an easy way for their clients to save and/or print their pictures without having to pay for it. They loose money afterall and they need to do whatever they can maximize, "profits".

My questions are as follows... do photographers in general use the "maximum profitability" -type of business model?

do you think some of them are mislead by these commercial services that use "flash-based-and-all-inclusive" solutions is the only way for them to maximize profits?

wouldn't you rather roll-out your own solution if you're paying for a domain name & hosting? and what core features would you look for in an online photo-gallery solution that you can deploy yourself?

[Caimin]

I'm a freelance Flash / web developer - and yes, my photography site (see sig link) is in Flash. The reason most photographers and agencies use Flash is to prevent - as much as possible - theft of the images and the "right-click-and-send-to-my-mother" brigade.

Flash doesn't have to be non user-friendly and unfortunately there are at least as many unusable websites created in html as in Flash.

wouldn't you rather roll-out your own solution if you're paying for a domain name & hosting?

Professional web hosting can be had for $10 a month. Developing a custom web storefront - Flash or not - is considerably more expensive than that. That said, my fees are excellent :D

[Actionphotog]

Caimin thanks for the walk down memory lane with the photos on your website. I grew up in Italy during the 1970's.

I am setting up a wedding website for my studio. The main site will be html with Flash for the password protected proof gallaries albums for the sole purpose of stopping, as Caimin put it ""right-click-and-send-to-my-mother" brigade."
I'm going to be working on the possiblity of an email feature where you can select photos you want to email someone and pay for them.
Because I have programming experience and have developed websites before I will be doing all the work for the site.
And as far as my hosting company, for $79 a year I can host 6 domains with dedicated IP's unlimited emails and sub-domains amd most important unlimited storage space for files.
So if you look around you can find good/great deals as far as hosting go.

[imagestablized]

Flash doesn't have to be non user-friendly and unfortunately there are at least as many unusable websites created in html as in Flash.


Soooo true. For people wanting to steal photos from flash pages, all they have to do is print the page into a PDF and well, crop the unnecessary data out, save as JPG then bam! I was on this one photogs site, where it was in flash and with the right click disabled.

[UncleDoug]

I'm reworking my site using HTML, PHP, JavaScript, Flash and some DHTML.

I say use what strikes your fancy, but don't forget your clients and what you want your site to do.

Image theft on the net is rampant and there is no real way to combat it unless you use water marks so the image is unusable anywhere else.

I go off the theory that I post images too small to print out in any reasonably usable format and back things up with watermarks.